Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn’t. In the past couple weeks we’ve had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was all over the place–I’ll just link the USA Today article as one example. The other two vanished with barely a peep.
The New York Times, September 28, 2003
Daniel Rios is 24 years old, with wavy black hair, a thick mustache and a glassy stare that seems to look both at you and through you. One day almost four years ago, while he was taking a shower, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain, and he collapsed on the bathroom floor. After emergency surgery, he lay in a coma for three weeks. When he finally opened his eyes, he could not speak or move his body; his head simply lolled. In the months that followed, the doctors monitoring him at the Center for Head Injuries at the J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., saw few signs that he had any meaningful mental life.
Continue reading “What if There Is Something Going On in There”
I wrote an article for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn’t even begin to explain how the research I describe in the article–using PET and MRI scans to measure the brain activity in people with traumatic brain injuries–is a beautiful reverse twist on some of the most famous research ever done on the brain: the nineteenth century doctor Pierre Paul Broca’s discovery of a region of the brain dedicated to speech.
I write about science, and in a recent overhaul of my web site, I decided it was a good time to add a blog. I’ll be posting thoughts about new research in the fields that I can’t get enough of–the brain and the body, how they evolved, and where they’re going. I’m still getting the hang of iblog, and so the first few posts will probably be pretty clunky. And until I can figure out how to post comments, please feel free to email me. I will try to post some messages from time to time in my own posts.
Discover, June 30, 2003
In the 1960s, a team of scientists studying the DNA of men imprisoned in a Scottish institution for violent offenders reported that a disproportionate number of them carried an extra Y chromosome. From that correlation the scientists theorized that this abnormality more or less doomed a man to a life of violent crime. One Y chromosome programs a fertilized egg to become male; the Scottish researchers concluded that if you double the Y–as happens in one out of every thousand male births–then you double all the aggression ostensibly hardwired into all men.